I'm not starting up an award

The background - a gap in the SFF award network?

Over the past couple of years, I’ve done historical surveys of queer SFF over the past 30 years. You can see the results in the threads on my bluesky account here and here. It was actually quite difficult to find well curated lists of queer SFF until very recently, and while that has somewhat improved (see K A Doore’s lists in recent years here and Kila Green’s excellent database here), these have the virtue and the vice of being totally inclusive - it’s everything on the radar, not a curated recommendation of quality.

So up until the 2020s, I had two key sources to look at pretty much every year: the speculative fiction category in the Lambda Literary Awards (running, with slightly different categories, from 1989 to present) and the Gaylactic Spectrum awards, which ran from 1998 to 2019. Both of these awards did and do great work bringing queer SFF to the fore, a lot of which until very recently was largely overlooked by mainstream SFF awards. Each also have a slightly different sensibility, with the Lammy skewing in two quite divergent directions: towards the literary at one end and queer romantasy (before that term was a thing) at the other, while the Gaylactic Spectrum cast a pretty broad net but tended in particular to spotlight midlist queer SFF: quirkily commercial but high quality. Sadly Gaylacticon (at which the Gaylatic Spectrum was awarded) went on hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic. Happily, it returned in 2025, but from brief emails exchanged with the organisers, they don’t seem to be planning on reviving the Award.

Having found it so useful in my backlist diving, I was a little disappointed. Yes, mainstream awards are much more diverse now (witness, for example, Arkady Martine winning the Hugo and being nominated for both a Nebula and a Lammy in 2022), and the Lammy is still going, doing great work. But the Lammy is a single category in an award not dedicated to genre (and thus sometimes does not seem to be fully across the SFF of that year), and genre culture can easily cease being as comparatively queer friendly as it is now (there already seems to be signs of a slightly grim turn in SFF publishing). So I wondered if, in the same way that a gay sports bar has value even when both gay bars and non-homophobic mainstream sports bars exist, there’s still value in an award by and for queer SFF nerds.

And then I realised we can test this out: we have five years of no Gaylactic Spectrum and a bit of hindsight benefit (2025 seems too recent just yet). So what would it look like if I put together some lists of books trying to replicate the work the award did?

The exercise - a spotlight, not an award

The very first thing to note is that this is NOT an award; the idea is to see if there’s worthwhile lens of “by queer SFF nerd, for queer SFF nerds” that can be applied to spotlight queer SF broadly defined that isn't wholly covered by existing increasingly queer friendly mainstream SFF awards and a Lammy that does generally good work. I will not be handing out etched lucite on a stand to anyone at the end of this.

Looking at the Gaylactic Spectrum shortlists from 1998 to 2019, with a few high and low outliers, the shortlist generally ranged from 7 to 10 books including the winner. Given the nature of the project as a retrospective spotlight, I propose to err on the side of inclusiveness and list 10 works including one I think is particularly deserving of attention (not a winner because this is, again, not an award).

The Gaylactic Spectrum citation from 1998 was "works in science fiction, fantasy and horror which include positive explorations of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender... characters, themes, or issues." I want to honour the history and kaupapa of the award, but I also want to modernise it, so I'll be clear that work which has positive aspec exploration or characters or is queer more generally can absolutely be included. I’ll also take a broad view (as I think the award did historically) of “positive” here - I’m not setting out to do all cozy all the time, just work which avoids the stereotypes and caricatures I’m sure the award framers were concerned about when wording the citation that way.

The value of the broad citation - looking at themes or characters is, I think, that different things are achieved and different effects created in works that are deeply queer to their core themes and construction compared works of more down the middle mainstream SFF which feature prominent queer characters. The citation recognizes value in both and honours both, and I think there is value in both. Queer in my view has for a long time referred to two things: a sensibility focused on a disruptive relationship with power and mainstream society and also as an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities (or, as we’d put it in New Zealand, the Rainbow Community). Often those two meanings overlap, but sometimes they are in tension (e.g. fiction set in secondary worlds which have societies that do not discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people often somewhat counterintuitively do not have that disruptive relationship with the centre of power that queering something involves). And I repeat my conviction that there is value in both concepts whether one is present or both, and whether the two pull in concert and in tension. I will look for works which do all of these.

As noted above, a common thread of sensibility within the Gaylactic Spectrum is a distinct though certainly not universal preference for the sort of aesthetic that the best quality midlist big publisher SFF served up in the 90s and 00s and I want to honour that approach; good quality, quirky but commercial SFF that's queer or full of queers is something that awards quite often pass over. My hypothesis going in is that this is where any particular gap in the current awards landscape is likely to be found.

So what I’m going to do is seek out every well-reviewed title I can find that meets the citation for each year from 2020 to 2024. Everything I read that year that I’d call an A- or above. I’ll put a call out on bluesky to ask for additions to my draft longlist (I’ve already done this for 2020 and 2021, expect 2022-2024 over the rest of February). And then I’ll start making some calls that’ll be difficult, because I think we’ve had a lot of stunning queer SFF over those 5 years.

Some rules I’ve set myself to try to cast the next quite widely:

• At least 4 books per year that did not make the Hugo, Nebula, or Lambda SFF shortlists.

• No more than 3 books by a single imprint each year.

• At least 1 - and I will strive for 2 - non Big 4 (i.e. independent press or self-pub) book each year.

• Because it's a five year retrospective, it means where an author has been prolific in producing quality queer SFF over that period, I can make sure there is a representative slot across the 5 shortlists in a way you can't just looking at things year by year the way an actual award would work. The obverse of this is that I won't include any author more than twice across the five years (and it'd require two truly outstanding works to get past once).

• Where I'm struggling to decide between two works to include on a shortlist, as a tiebreak I will give preference to any that has not appeared on a major mainstream SFF award shortlist.

• The Gaylactic Spectrum award also had a Hall of Fame category that I'm going to make use of to recognise queer SFF books from that already have pretty much universal award recognition: If a book won one of the Lammy, Hugo, or Nebula and was on the shortlist for all 3 I'll note it as a "hall of fame" book but it's got it's props, it's not going in the main list of an exercise designed to expand the spotlight (A Desolation Called Peace, which I mentioned above, will fall into this category).

Ultimately this is my reckons as a single individual SFF fan, done in good faith and taking advice from friends and critics whose taste I trust, yes, but still my reckons. Not an award! It’s inherently subjective, so don't get big mad about stuff I don't include that you might like. I'll happily admit I have some blind spots and some distinct subgenre preferences, and while I'll take advice to try to fill around those, ultimately if it's something I completely bounce off it won't be in there, regardless of how much praise the thing has (probably correctly!) got elsewhere. That is about me, not about the book.

I’ll need to do some re-reading (and just reading of books that escaped my notice at the time), so this whole thing will take a while. We’ll see how I go, but I suspect about a month for each year. Happily, I believe this works out just right to start in Pride month where I live (March), and should finish at the height of summer Pride season in the Northern Hemisphere across June and July.

Not an award, but what’s it called?

One final thing I need to do to honour the tradition this exercise is based on. You’ll have noticed that the original award contains a truly groan-worthy pun. I’ve gotta have some of that action if I’m going to do this. So; y'all can look forward over the next few months to the 2020 to 2024 entries of the Queersar Not An Award for excellence in early 2020s queer SFF and SFF with queers.